On Taking Toys R Us Literally
Doctrine and theology are one thing. Political and cultural policies are another. Are they united? Yes, but their union allows those who know Scripture to distinguish them from each other and not blur the lines of distinction so that you end up dissolving them into each other. All our knowledge can be understood as our distinguishing one reality from another while understanding what marks the relationships between realities. What has developed over the last two centuries is the dissolving of knowing into being so that what people assert as true has no other standard than themselves. They took Toys R Us literally. They are their knowledge; their truth claims are them.
Yes, over the past 50 years (and it has become especially intense over the past 30) there has been a concerted effort by some in the West to denigrate “white” people. White males have been identified by some as the great demons of everything that is wrong in the West. Yes, it has swamped most colleges and universities in the West. If you have grown up as a white male in the past 30 years, you have been taught that you are “toxic.” Frankly, I cannot imagine growing up with that ideology shoved in your face as a child—every single day. White males in America especially, but Europe as well, who are 45 years and younger have been subjected to serious levels of hate and prejudice. It has had extremely damaging results.
This same “anti-white male” ideology has been coupled with mass immigration, multi-culturalism, and the denigration of Christianity. Along with this has come the mass migration of Muslims, rape gangs and the devastation of Europe. It is a real live question as to whether Europe, or at least parts of it, is not going to be taken over by Islam. In the midst of all this it is entirely understandable why there would be a corresponding backlash from some white males, perhaps even especially those who profess to be Christians, even some pastors.
But the antidote and only alternative to all the bashing of white males and open borders mass illegal immigration is not to swing the pendulum hard in the opposite direction and wield the same identity politics hammer that you were bludgeoned with as a kid. That hammer has been and continues to be used precisely because it is non-Christian weapon. That weapon represents a non-Christian theology or doctrine. It expresses a clear anti-Christian view of humans, human flourishing and how to configure nation-states. God’s word specifically tells us that the weapons for Christian warfare match the kind of warfare we are engaged in—a spiritual one that is rooted in who Jesus is, and therefore what he has done, is doing and will do. The weapons we use are not “of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2Cor. 10:4)
This power that destroys strongholds is the gospel (Romans (1:16-17). The gospel is the good news regarding who Jesus is and what he has done, is doing and will do to overthrow sin and Satan, and to bring his eternal kingdom over all creation. Yes, it addresses every matter of human life, which unavoidably means it has “political” implications. Unavoidably so. The fundamental Christian confession—Jesus is Lord—was precisely what got the earliest Christians persecuted by some of the Roman emperors, because it contradicted, in a fundamental way, the “politics” of the Roman Empire. Those who want to not merely distinguish the governing of the civil realm from Scripture, Christian theology and the authority and operations of the church, but in fact disconnect them, so that individual Christians and churches and denominations have no meaningful message to or engagement with the civil realm have a foundational misunderstanding of the gospel. But there is another danger besides operating with a disconnect and that is to dissolve these realities into each other.
When we think that our political, social or cultural policies about race and immigration are the only ones faithful to the gospel, and in fact become the litmus test by which we evaluate whether others are faithful to the gospel, we have dissolved the civil into the churchly, the political into the spiritual and theological, and we have betrayed the gospel, just as much as those who disconnect those realms. Like the Pharisees and Sadducees, who thought themselves arch enemies, but found themselves comrades against Jesus, so too the “stay out of politics Christians” find themselves on the same sidelines as the “we will implement the kingdom of God by our political policies crowd.” There are always two cliffs to fall off that border the Christian path.
The Christian church has persevered and prospered under all kinds of different political systems, and cultural conditions that have, on a number of occasions, included the mixing of all kinds of ethnicities for over two millenniums across the entire earth. I absolutely believe that nation-states need borders. Every nation-state has the right to establish its own culture and the laws to preserve it. In itself, that says nothing about one’s skin color or the validity of the mixing of cultures, ethnicities, and people of various skin colors. To think that people of various cultures, ethnicities and skin colors cannot live together in peaceful harmony under one law is a denial of the gospel. It is this very point that troubled the early church and the apostles roundly denounced it on the basis of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Read the book of Acts. If you cannot understand these points or disagree with them it is a sign that your reasoning disqualifies you for church leadership, because you do not understand the gospel very well at all.
In his essay “The Antiquity and Unity of the Human Race,” B. B. Warfield, who was one of the stoutest defenders of biblical Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries stated the following: “The assertion of the unity of the human race is imbedded in the very structure of the Biblical narrative. . . . Accordingly, although Israel was taught to glory in its exaltation by the choice of the Lord to be His peculiar people, Israel was not permitted to believe there was anything in itself which differentiated it from other peoples; and by the laws concerning aliens and slaves was required to recognize the common humanity of all sorts of conditions of men; what they had to distinguish them from others was not of nature, but of the free gift of God, in the mysterious working out of His purpose of good not only to Israel but the whole world. . . . So far is it from being of no concern to theology, therefore, that it would be truer to say that the whole doctrinal structure of the Bible account of redemption is founded on its assumption that the race of man is one organic whole, and may be dealt with as such.” (Italics mine)
